The boots stopped an inch from her face. Jay stared at them — scarred leather, scuffed metal toe caps, a dusting of something that might have been dried blood or might have been rust — and felt the deck plating cold under her forearms, felt the wet spread beneath her knees where Cassiday's load had pooled and begun to cool. The crew's laughter had thinned to something meaner, quieter, a ring of men standing in a loose semicircle around her with their cocks still out and their attention fixed on the Captain like dogs waiting on a whistle.

"On your feet."

Jones's voice was not loud. It did not need to be. Jay's body obeyed before her mind had finished hearing the words — knees locking, hands scraping the deck for purchase, the whole length of her rising in one unsteady motion while Cassiday's seed ran down the inside of her thighs in two slow lines and her tits, small and new and tender, hung heavy and unfamiliar on her chest. She stood with her arms loose at her sides because she did not know where else to put them. She had learned that much, at least, in the cargo bay. You did not cover yourself. You did not hide. You stood and let them look.

Jones walked a slow circle around her.

His cybernetic eye tracked over her like a scanner, and the organic one followed a half-beat behind, and Jay felt every inch of the attention like a hand. The bruises on her ribs where a boot had caught her. The new softness at her jaw where the primer had sanded the hard planes of her face into something rounder. The narrow waist cinched in above her hips. The two small breasts with their dark new nipples still peaked from the cold air and the fear. And lower, at the top of her left thigh, the horseshoe tattoo Cassiday had inked into her ass cheek — fresh enough that the skin around it was still pink and raised, the black lines of it stark against her pale flank.

"Look at that," Jones said. "Cassiday's been busy."

He stopped behind her. Jay could not see him but she could feel him — the heat off his body, the ozone smell of him, the weight of his gaze on the back of her neck like a hand about to close. Her ass clenched without her permission. The ring of muscle that Cassiday had stretched and stretched again over the last hours had gone slack and open, and the clench did not close it, only squeezed the last of the load out of her in a wet, sputtering little fart that broke the quiet of the cargo bay like a dropped plate.

The crew howled.

Jones laughed loudest of all, a wet grinding sound that shook his shoulders, and Jay felt her face burn from the roots of her hair — what was left of it, the fine new fuzz that had come in soft and downy where her scalp used to be thick — down to her collarbones. More of Cassiday's seed pattered onto the deck between her feet, a thin rope of it swinging from the inside of her thigh, and she could not stop it, could not clench it back, could only stand there and drip while men she did not know laughed at the sound her body made.

"A filthy cum dump," Jones said, coming back around to face her. "That's what you are now. That's what the doctor made. A hole that leaks like a badly sealed faucet."

Jay's cock — still there, still hers, still the one part of her the primer had not erased — twitched against her thigh. She felt it happen and hated herself for it, the shame rising hot and tight in her throat, but the primer did not care about shame. The primer took the word *dump* and the word *hole* and the word *scared* and ran them through the new wiring Cassiday had laid down under her skin, and by the time they reached her cock they had turned into heat.

Jones saw it. Of course he saw it. His organic eye flicked down to her half-hard cock and back up to her face, and the jagged line of his mouth spread wider.

"You like that."

"I—"

"Don't lie to me, sissy. I can see it." He pointed one thick, metal-knuckled finger at the deck between her feet, at the puddle of Cassiday's seed she had just leaked out of her own ass. "Clean that up. With your tongue."

The crew went quiet. Waiting.

Jay looked at the puddle. It was not large — most of the load had gone into her, and what had come back out was thinned with her own slick — but it was enough. A smear of pale fluid on grey plating, catching the hard light of the cargo bay, with a little dark grit from the deck mixed into it. Her stomach turned over. The old Jay — the mechanic, the man with the grease-stained knuckles and the slow thoughtful nod — would have spat at this. The old Jay would have taken the beating that followed the spit.

She knelt.

The deck was cold on her knees. She put her hands down flat on either side of the puddle and bent forward from the waist, and the position opened her — she felt it happen, felt the air move against the loose, wet ring of her asshole, felt her own weight pull the gap wider — and she knew without looking that Jones was standing behind her with a clear view straight down into the ruin Cassiday had made of her. She heard him breathe in slow through his nose. She heard someone in the crew mutter something and someone else shush him.

She put her tongue to the deck.

It was worse than she had braced for. The plating was cold and gritty and tasted of oil and old rust and something saltier underneath, and the seed itself was thick and slick and bitter, and she had to press her tongue flat and drag it slow to lift the mess off the metal. She did it. She did it again. She gathered the puddle into her mouth a tongueful at a time and swallowed it down, and every swallow made her throat work and her eyes sting, and behind her she could feel the weight of Jones's gaze sitting right at the rim of her asshole like a finger about to push in.

"Deeper," Jones said. "Get in the seam."

She bent lower. Her forehead nearly touched the deck. The blood ran down into her head and made her dizzy, and the new weight of her tits hung under her chest and swung with the small motion of her tongue, and she licked the seam between two plates clean while the crew watched and somebody — she did not know who — let out a low whistle.

When she looked up, Jones had opened his trousers.

His cock was coming out of his fly with difficulty. That was the first thing she noticed — the way he had to work it free, the way the leather of his belt strained, the way the shaft kept catching on the fabric because there was so much of it and it was so thick. The second thing she noticed was that it was wrong. Veined wrong. Lumpy wrong. The skin was a mottled grey-pink and there were ridges of grafted tissue running up the length of it in uneven bands, and the head of it was bulbous and dark, and it was still only half-hard and already longer than any cock she had taken since Cassiday's horse dick, and it was pointing straight at her face.

"You've seen the doctor's work," Jones said. "This is mine."

He stepped closer. The head of his cock brushed her cheek, hot and heavy, and left a wet smear across her skin, and Jay's whole body flinched except the part of her that the primer had rewired, which leaned into the contact and made her mouth water.

"Open."

She opened.

He fed it to her slow. The head was too big to take in one go — she felt it press past her lips and hit the roof of her mouth and stop there, a blunt hot weight against her palate, and she had to tilt her head back and open her jaw wider and let her tongue slide down under the shaft to make room. Jones grunted. He pushed another inch. Her jaw ached at the corners and her eyes watered and she breathed hard through her nose to keep from gagging, and he just held it there, lodged in her mouth, letting her feel the size of him.

"That's it," he said. "Get used to it. You'll be wearing it a while."

He pulled back and pushed in again, deeper, and this time the head slid past her palate and into her throat, and Jay's whole body convulsed around the intrusion. She choked. Spit ran out of the corners of her mouth and down her chin and onto her own tits, and her hands came up off the deck on instinct to push at his hips, and he caught both her wrists in one of his huge scarred hands and pinned them behind her back.

"No hands, whore."

Without her hands she had nothing to brace on, and the angle changed, and he used it — one hand in her new soft hair, gripping the downy fuzz at the back of her skull, the other holding her wrists, and he fucked her mouth in long slow strokes that went deeper every time. Jay's throat made wet sounds around him. Her spit ran down her chin and dripped onto the deck. Her knees slid a little on the plating and she had to work to stay upright, and all the while her own cock hung between her legs and leaked onto the floor, hard as it had ever been, harder than it had been when Cassiday fucked her with his horse cock, because the primer had taken the ache in her jaw and the burn in her throat and the shame of being held down and used in front of others and turned every one of them into heat.

"Look at you," Jones said, and his voice had gone rough and thick. "The doctor told me you'd be good. He said you'd take it and come from it. He didn't say you'd drip like a bitch in heat." He pushed in to the root and held. Jay's nose pressed into the grafted ridges of his belly and she could smell him — ozone and sweat and the sharp animal musk of his groin — and she could not breathe and she did not want to and she swallowed around him because her body had decided that was the thing to do and her body was no longer taking orders from her brain.

Suddenly Jay felt a hot burning deep in his throat and instinctively swallowed what he thought was cum but as he swallowed the flood backed up filling his mouth and he realised it was worse. The acrid tang of urine assaulted his senses laying seige to his mind and body. Fearful of Jones’s reaction should he spill a drop Jay desperately swallowed repeatedly inspite of his revulsion and shame at being used as a urinal. He felt the acidic burn all the way down to his stomach where it seemed to pool. Above him Jones sighed as he relieved the pressure as he emptied his bladder into sissy’s whore throat.

Shame washed through Jay as he continued to kneel, another mans huge obscene cock in his mouth, the rest of the crew jeering and laughing at his debasement. “Use her like a toilet boss, show the bitch what a worthless piss slut she is!”. Another wave of shame rushed though him at the words and to his horror his hard cock spasmed and pulsed as a dry orgasm crested over him as Jones emptied the last few drops into his throat.

He pulled out and let her gasp. Spit and piss leaked from her mouth. She sucked air in through her mouth in ragged pulls, and her jaw hung slack, and she looked up at him from her knees with her eyes streaming and her face wet and her tits heaving, and Jones looked down at her and laughed.

"Now the other end."

He hauled her up by the hair. She came to her feet with a yelp, stumbling, and he walked her across the cargo bay with a fist in her hair like a man leading a heifer, past a stack of crates, past the crew who fell back out of the way and watched, and stopped at a low flat container near the loading doors. He shoved her down over it. Her belly hit the lid and her tits mashed flat against the cold metal and her feet came up off the floor, and she had to scramble to get her toes back down, and by the time she was braced he was already behind her with his cock in his fist.

"Spread."

She spread her knees. The container was too low and the angle was wrong and she had to arch her back and push her ass up to present herself, and she did it, she did it without being told twice, and she felt the cold air move against the open wet ring of her asshole and knew he could see straight down into her, knew he could see the load Cassiday had left in there still glistening in the dark of her. She reached back and pulled her buttocks wide, further opening her obscenely gaping hole.

Jones put the head of his cock against her and stopped.

"You're already open," he said. "Cassiday did the work for me."

"Please—"

"Please what."

Jay did not know. Please stop, please go, please be gentle, please be rough — the words were all the same word now, all of them routed through the same hot wire under her skin, and she did not know which one her mouth had been about to say. She said nothing. She put her forehead down on the cold lid of the container and waited.

He pushed in.

Her ass took him easier than it should have. Cassiday had stretched her past the point of resistance hours ago and the primer had made the stretch itself into pleasure, so Jones slid into her in one long wet push that bottomed out with his hips flush against her ass cheeks and his grafted ridges dragging along every nerve she had. Jay's mouth came open and a sound came out of it that she did not recognize — half groan, half sob, all of it need — and behind her Jones grunted and said, "That’s it whore, take it all and scream for me you little bitch."

He fucked her hard from the first stroke. No warm-up, no slow build — he had watched Cassiday use her for an hour on the cctv and he knew what she could take, and he took it. His hips slapped against her ass and the sound of it echoed off the cargo bay walls, and the container rocked under her belly, and she had to grip the edges with both hands to keep from sliding off. His cock was thick and wrong-shaped and the grafted ridges scraped her in places Cassiday's smooth veined horse dick had never touched, and every scrape lit up the primer and sent heat flooding up her spine and down into her cock, which swung heavy and hard between her thighs and slapped against the container with every thrust.

"How's it feel," Jones said. Not a question. A demand.

"Good," Jay said. The word came out broken and wet. "Good, Captain. It’s so big Sir. Please—"

"Please what."

"Harder."

The crew laughed. Jay heard them and burned and did not care, because Jones had heard her too and had answered by driving into her harder, and the slap of his hips had gone from a rhythm to a hammering and the container was skidding across the deck by inches and she was making sounds now, real sounds, the kind of sounds that came up out of her chest without her permission, and her cock was leaking a thin string of pre-cum onto the metal lid beneath her and her ass was clenching around him in waves she could not control.

"You're going to come from this," Jones said. "From getting fucked in the ass by a man that has turned you into a sissy whore. A brood mare to be fucked. On the deck of a pirate ship. With my whole crew watching." He leaned down over her back and his breath was hot on her ear and his voice had gone low and mean. "That's what Cassiday made you. That's what I'm selling. A sissy whore who comes on a cock in her ass and thanks the man for it."

"Thank you," Jay said. She did not know she was going to say it until it was out of her mouth. "Thank you, Captain. Please Sir, harder. Take that worthless ass. Make it yours!"

"That's right whore. Beg for it."

He fucked her through her first orgasm. She came with her face pressed to the container and her ass up and her whole body shaking, and her cock pulsed against the cold metal and left a hot stripe of cum on the lid as his cock milked her prostate gland, and Jones did not slow down for any of it, just kept hammering into her while she clenched and shook and sobbed, using her through the aftershocks the way Cassiday had taught the whole ship to use her — as a hole that was still warm after it came.

"Again," he said.

"I can't—"

"You can. The primer doesn't let you not." He reached around her hip and took her cock in his fist, and his hand was huge and rough and metal-knuckled, and he jerked her in time with his thrusts, and Jay's overworked body climbed toward a second peak it had no business reaching. Her thighs shook. Her breath came in short hitching pulls. Her ass was sore and full and the grafted ridges on his cock dragged at her rim on every stroke and it was too much, it was all too much, and the too-much was the thing that pushed her over.

She came again. Dry this time, or nearly — a thin dribble and a whole-body clench that rippled down the length of Jones's cock and made him groan behind her.

"There," he said. "There's the whore the doctor promised me."

He held her down using his full upper body weight to press down on her shoulders, Her soft breasts digging into the crate. Her sensitive nipples crushed beneath her. He fucked her four more strokes and then he came. Jay felt it — the sudden swell of him inside her, the pulse of it, the heat spreading through her guts in a way the primer translated into pleasure even now, even spent, even wrecked. “Yes make me your bitch, breed me!” Jay screamed.

Jones held himself deep and ground against her ass and emptied into her, and his load joined Cassiday's in the ruin of her, and when he finally pulled out the two of them ran out of her together in a thick slow spill that she felt travel down the inside of her thigh and drip off her knee onto the deck.

“T…Thank you Sir.” Jay stammered.

Jones stepped back. He was breathing hard. He tucked himself away without cleaning up, and Jay stayed where she was, bent over the container, because no one had told her to move.

"Cassiday," Jones said, raising his voice to the room. "How long until the broker docks?"

The old doctor's voice came from somewhere behind her, dry and pleased. "five minutes, Captain. Give or take."

"Good." Jones walked a slow circle around the container and stopped where Jay could see his boots again. "Get her in the frame so the broker can see what a filthy whore she is." He paused. "And somebody mark the count. That was number thirteen."

Jay heard the scratch of a stylus on paper somewhere behind her. She stayed bent over the container with her forehead on the cold lid and her ass still up and her legs still spread, because no one had told her to move, and because if she stayed exactly where she was she did not have to decide anything, did not have to look at anyone, did not have to feel the two men's seed running down her leg and know that it was number thirteen that had made her come twice and she had thanked him for it.

A hand closed on the back of her neck. Not Jones's — smaller, colder, with the dry papery grip she had learned to recognize. Cassiday.

"Up," he said. "You've got a broker to impress."

She straightened. Her legs were unsteady and her ass ached and her jaw ached and her cock was still half-hard and raw against her thigh, and when she turned to face the room the whole crew was looking at her with disgust and pity — the men who had used her, the men who had watched, the men who had counted — and none of them were laughing anymore. They were appraising her. The way a man appraises a horse he is about to sell.

"Five minutes," Cassiday said again, and took her by the arm. "Plenty of time to consider your shame."

Jay let herself be led. There was nothing else to do with herself. She was a hole that had just been used, a count that had just been marked, a product that had five minutes left before it went on display, covered in cum, spit and piss, ass gaping and leaking the seed of over a dozen lovers, the tattoos that declared what she was — and somewhere behind her, on the deck of the cargo bay, the puddle she had licked clean was drying in the hard light, and the two loads she was still carrying would be running out of her the whole way to the frame.

Cassiday's grip on her arm was dry and precise, the fingers of a man who had spent sixty years learning exactly how much pressure a body could take before it bruised. He did not hurry her. He did not need to. He walked her out of the cargo bay at a pace that let every member of the crew get a long look at what she had become — the downy scalp, the small swinging tits, the horseshoe inked into her left cheek, the two men's seed still tracking slow lines down the inside of her thighs.

Jay kept her eyes on the deck plates. She counted them. That was a thing she could do. One, two, three, four — the seams between them, the grit in the seams, the little dark spots that might have been oil or might have been something older. Counting was a place to put her mind so it did not have to be in her body, and her body was the thing everyone else was looking at.

"Head up," Cassiday said. "You walk like a whipped dog and the broker will price you like one."

She lifted her chin. It cost her more than the kneeling had.

The corridor out of the cargo bay was narrow and hot and smelled of the ship's recycled air — metal, ozone, the sweetish undertone of coolant bleeding somewhere in the walls. Cassiday steered her past a hatch, past a bank of lockers with their doors hanging open, past a crewman in a stained coverall who leaned against the bulkhead and watched her pass without a word, his eyes traveling down her body in a slow, unhurried inventory that started at her tits and ended between her legs and did not bother to come back up. Jay felt her face heat. She kept walking.

Behind her, the crewman said, low, to no one: "Thirteen."

Jay did not know if he meant her count or the number of men who had used her or the number of days she had left. She did not ask. She had learned not to ask.

The frame room was at the end of the corridor, past a heavy pressure door that Cassiday opened with a code Jay did not bother to watch. The room beyond was smaller than the cargo bay and brighter — overhead strips running full, no shadow anywhere — and in the center of it stood the frame.

Jay had seen it before. She had hung in it while the primer ate through her nerves. She had come in it more times than she could count, while Cassiday watched her from a stool with his notebook open and his spectacles catching the light. But seeing it now, with the broker five minutes out and her body still leaking and her count just marked, was a different thing. It looked like what it was. A rack. A display stand. A device for holding meat in a useful position.

"In," Cassiday said.

She stepped up onto the low platform at the base of it. The steel was cold under her bare feet. Cassiday took her left wrist and buckled it into the cuff at shoulder height — worn leather over steel, the leather dark and shiny with the oil of many wrists — and then her right, and then he knelt, without ceremony, and buckled her ankles into the cuffs at the base of the frame, spreading her legs to a width that put her open. Cuntless, cock hanging, ass gaping, everything she had below the waist turned outward for whoever walked through the door.

He stood and looked at her the way a man looks at a piece he has finished carving.

"Good," he said. "The primer's done its work on the musculature. Hips have rotated. Waist is down to — " he measured her with his eyes, thumb and forefinger held up, " — twenty-six inches, near enough. Breasts will fill out another cup in a week if the broker wants the full course." He made a note in his book. "He will."

"Doctor—"

"Speak when spoken to."

Jay closed her mouth.

Cassiday dragged a stool to the corner of the room and sat down with his book open on his knee, and for a while there was no sound in the frame room but the hum of the ventilation and the scratch of his stylus and the small wet sounds Jay's body made every time she shifted her weight — the seed moving in her, the air moving across the open ring of her ass. She hung there and the shame came down on her in slow waves, and she could not lift her hands to cover anything, and she could not close her legs, and she could not turn her face away from the door.

This was the part Cassiday had promised her. Plenty of time to consider your shame.

She considered it.

She thought about the bar near the space docks where she had met Captain Vance. The smell of spilled beer and cheap synth-whiskey and the dry heat of the ventilation. The way she had sat with her back to the wall because a man who has been laid off learns to sit with his back to the wall. The way Vance had looked at her across the table — not like a woman looking at a man, she understood now, but like a buyer looking at a tool still in its packaging.

She had said yes. That was the thing. She had said yes. Nobody had forced her onto the Venture's Star. Nobody had dragged her up the loading ramp. She had carried her own bag aboard and she had been grateful for the berth and she had not asked a single question about the job description because she had been out of work for eleven months and her savings had run down to the cost of a one-way shuttle ticket and a week of bar food.

The primer had taken that memory and run it through the new wiring, and the shame of it had come out the other side as heat, and Jay felt her cock thicken against her thigh where it hung. She could not stop it. She could not even want to stop it. That was the worst of it — the wanting. The primer had not just made the shame into pleasure; it had made her want the shame to keep coming, because the shame was the thing that fed the heat, and the heat was the only thing left in her that felt like being alive.

She tried to feel the old Jay. The mechanic. The man with the grease under his nails and the slow nod and the quiet pride of a job done right. She tried to find him somewhere down inside her and she could not. There was just the frame and the cold steel and the two loads moving in her and the count of thirteen and the door that would open any minute.

"Doctor," she said, before she could stop herself.

Cassiday did not look up from his book. "Mm."

"What — what happens after the broker."

"You're sold."

"I know. I mean — after."

Now he looked up. The pale watery eyes behind the wire rims were amused in a way that made her stomach drop, and he closed the book over his finger to keep his place.

"After," he said, "you go where you're sent. That's the whole of it. You're not a man with a future, girl. You're a product with a delivery address." He opened the book again. "The broker will have clients. The clients will have appetites. You'll be shipped to whichever appetite pays best, and you'll be used there until you're used up, and then you'll be sold again, or scrapped, or used for parts. There's no after. There's just the next buyer."

"And you — " Jay's voice cracked and she swallowed and tried again. "And you don't — you don't feel anything about that."

"I feel a great deal about it," Cassiday said. "I feel pride. You were a broken-down middle-aged mechanic with a bad back and a worse attitude when you came aboard. I made you into a functioning sissy whore with a trained nerve nexus and a marketable body. That's craft. You'd feel the same if you'd rebuilt a wrecked drive into something that ran."

"I'm not a — " and she heard the words coming and could not stop them, " — I'm not a drive."

"You're exactly a drive," Cassiday said, without heat. "You have inputs and outputs. You respond to stimulus. You were designed for a function and you perform it. The only difference is that you're aware, which makes you better, not worse. A drive can't feel itself being used. You can." He turned a page. "That's the value-add."

Jay hung in the frame and looked at the floor and did not say anything else.

She thought about Birdie. She thought about the way Birdie had looked at her in the shuttle, in the dark, after the jump — the way she had gone down on her knees between Jay's legs and taken her cock in her mouth without being asked, as a thank-you, because they were both still shaking and neither of them had any other currency. She thought about leaving Birdie at her mother's door on Sarif IV, and the way Birdie had not looked back, and the way Jay had stood on the ramp and watched her go and understood that whatever they had been to each other had ended somewhere back on the Vixen and neither of them had noticed.

Birdie was safe. That was the one thing. Birdie was safe and Jay was in a frame, and the primer had taken the memory of Birdie's mouth and turned it into heat too, because the primer did not care what a memory was. It only cared that there was a nerve and an input.

"Two minutes," Cassiday said.

Jay's heart went up into her throat.

She heard the pressure door cycle. She heard boots on the deck — not Jones's heavy drumbeat, something lighter, quicker, the click of hard-soled shoes with a heel. She could not turn her head far enough to see the door without craning, and when she did, what came through it was a woman.

Late fifties, maybe. Tall. Grey hair swept back tight against her skull and pinned with something that caught the light. A long dark coat over a high-collared suit, gloves on both hands, a small tablet in one and a stylus in the other. She looked like a woman who had bought and sold a great many things and had long since stopped feeling any particular way about any of them.

Behind her came Jones, and behind Jones came two of the crew with a case between them.

"Doctor Cassiday," the woman said. "Captain."

"Madame Verhoeven." Cassiday rose and offered his hand, and the woman took it briefly, gloves and all. "Thank you for coming out this far."

"You said you had something worth the trip." She was already looking past him, at the frame, at Jay, and her eyes moved down Jay's body in the same slow inventory the crewman in the corridor had used — tits, waist, hips, cock, the horseshoe, the open ass — and Jay felt every stop of the journey like a touch. "Show me."

Cassiday stepped aside. The woman came forward and stopped a pace from the frame and stood with her tablet tucked under her arm and her head tilted slightly, and Jay hung there with her arms up and her legs spread and her body still leaking and let herself be looked at.

"Hm," Verhoeven said. It was not approval. It was not disapproval. It was the sound a woman makes when she is deciding whether a thing is worth the number on the tag.

She walked a slow half-circle around the frame. Jay heard the click of her heels on the deck, heard the small sound of her glove as she touched something — the leather of one cuff, maybe, or the steel of the frame itself — and then she was standing in front of Jay again, close, too close, and she reached up with one gloved hand and took Jay's chin between her fingers and turned her face left, then right.

"The jaw's good," she said. "Soft. The hair's a nice touch — most of them leave the scalp stubbled. What did you use for the hairline?"

"Follicular induction with a modified androgen blocker," Cassiday said. "Three rounds. She'll have a full head of fine hair in six weeks."

"Good. The jaw was the problem area on the last one you sent me." Verhoeven released Jay's chin and stepped back and looked at her tits, and Jay felt the gaze land on her nipples and felt them tighten, and hated her body for it, and felt the hate turn into heat in the same instant. "Small. B-cup?"

"A, and still filling."

"Clients like small on the sissies." Verhoeven made a note on her tablet with the stylus. "It reads younger. What are the nipples like — sensitive?"

"Very. I rewired the thoracic branch myself. She comes from nipple stimulation alone. Watch."

Cassiday stepped forward and put his thumb and forefinger on Jay's left nipple and pinched, hard, and Jay's whole body jerked in the cuffs and a sound came out of her that she did not recognize — a high, thin, humiliating sound — and her cock jumped and thickened and a bead of pre-cum slid out of the head and hung there, swinging, and did not fall.

"There," Cassiday said, and let go.

Verhoeven watched the bead of pre-cum swing and did not smile, exactly, but something moved in her face that might have been the front edge of it.

"Good," she said. "The last one took twenty seconds to respond. This one took — " she checked the tablet, " — under three. That's a better baseline."

"She's a better product," Cassiday said. "The last one was a sissy from a brothel. This one was a real man when she came aboard. That's the difference. You can't fake a real man's shame. You can only take it away, and it takes a while to come out the other side, and when it does, it's worth twice the price."

Jay heard the words a real man and something broke loose in her chest and started climbing toward her throat, and she swallowed it back down, because she was afraid of what would come out if she let it. She had been a real man. She had been a real man with a real job and a real back and a real set of knuckles, and now she was a better product than the last one, and the shame of it went through the primer and came out as heat, and her cock was still hard and leaking and the bead of pre-cum had finally let go and was running down the underside of her shaft.

Verhoeven circled the frame again and stopped behind her.

"Spread her," she said.

"She's spread."

"Wider."

Cassiday reached down and adjusted the ankle cuffs outward by two notches, and Jay felt the new width pull at the muscles of her inner thighs and open her ass further, and she heard Verhoeven breathe in through her nose, slow, the way a woman breathes in a good wine.

"Look at that," Verhoeven said. "That's a proper gaping hole. The last one you sent me couldn't take a fist without tearing. This one's been fisted?"

"Repeatedly. She's been through the whole crew and my own… equipment. The ring's slack but the muscle's intact — I checked this morning. She can be fisted tonight and take a cock tomorrow morning and neither will leave a mark."

"Good. My clients pay extra for the ones that can take a fist and still feel tight to a cock the next day." Verhoeven made another note. "How's the count?"

"Thirteen today alone, as of twenty minutes ago. The Captain was the last to fuck her ass."

"Thirteen." Verhoeven came back around to the front and looked at Jay's face, and Jay looked at her shoes and could not look up. "That's a good number. The last one was at nine when you shipped her and the client complained. Said she didn't feel broken enough. Said she still had opinions."

"This one doesn't have opinions," Cassiday said. "She has reflexes. Different thing."

"I'll be the judge." Verhoeven stepped close again and put her gloved hand on Jay's chest, flat, over the sternum, and Jay felt the leather cold against her skin and felt the heat come up under it and could not do anything about either. "Does she still have her name?"

"She answers to it. She also answers to whore, sissy, hole, cunt, and it. She's been trained not to have a preference."

"Let's hear it." Verhoeven looked at Jay. "What's your name."

"Jay."

"That's a man's name."

"Yes."

"Do you want to keep it."

Jay did not answer. She did not know how to answer. She had been Jay for forty-two years and she had been a hole for a month and the two things were still in her somewhere, and the question had found the place where they overlapped and put its thumb on it, and it hurt in a way the primer could not turn into heat.

"She doesn't know," Verhoeven said to Cassiday. "That's the sweet spot. That's where they're worth the most — before they decide. Once they decide they're a person again, the price drops. Once they decide they're a hole, the price drops too. It's the ones who can't decide that the clients pay for." She took her hand off Jay's chest and looked down at Jay's cock, which was still hard and still leaking and still bobbing slightly with every breath Jay took. "How's the cock."

"Functional. The primer didn't touch the erectile tissue. She can come on command and off command; she's had two orgasms in the last twenty minutes, the first time without even being touched there."

"Good. The clients like a sissy who can come from being used in the ass. It convinces them the sissy means it." Verhoeven reached down and took Jay's cock between two gloved fingers and lifted it, and Jay's whole body clenched and a sound came out of her that she tried to bite back and could not, and Verhoeven looked at the cock in her hand the way a woman looks at a piece of fruit she is considering buying. "She leaks a lot."

"She's been primed to leak. It's a response to the shame of being looked at."

"Good. My clients like a sissy who can't hide it." She let the cock drop and wiped her glove on the inside of her own coat, and turned to Cassiday. "How much."

"The Captain's asking eighty."

"Sixty."

"Seventy-five."

"Oh please, she stinks of piss and cum.” Jay closed his eyes with shame and embarrassed at that but despite that felt his cock twitch in response. “Sixty-five and I take her tonight."

Cassiday looked at Jones, who had been standing near the door with his arms crossed and his cybernetic eye tracking the negotiation without any particular expression. Jones shrugged.

"Sixty-eight," Cassiday said. "And you leave the case."

Verhoeven looked at the case the two crewmen had set down near the door. She looked at Jay. She looked at Jay's cock, which was still half-hard and still leaking, and at her tits, which were still peaked, and at the horseshoe inked into her left cheek, and at the open, gaping hole between her legs. “She’s taken your equine member I see”. Again humiliation burned in Jays cheeks.

"Sixty-eight," she said. "Deal."

She held out her gloved hand and Cassiday shook it, and Jay hung in the frame and watched the two of them agree on the price of her, and felt the shame go through her and come out the other side as heat, and felt her cock thicken again, and knew that whatever she had been when she walked into the bar near the space docks, she was now a number on a tablet and a handshake in a bright room, and the only thing left for her to do was to be worth the sixty-eight.

Verhoeven put her tablet away and stepped back to look at Jay one last time, head tilted, the way a woman looks at a thing she has just bought and is already planning how to use.

"Get her down," she said. "I want her in the case."

Jay's chest went tight. The case. She looked at it for the first time — a long dark crate on the deck near the door, banded with steel, fitted with a lid and a latch and a row of small vents along one side. It was big enough to hold a folded body. It was small enough to fit through a standard cargo hatch. It had a shipping label already on it, blank, waiting for a destination.

"Please," Jay said. She did not know she was going to say it until it was out of her mouth. "Please, not the case."

Verhoeven looked at her with mild interest, the way she might look at a dog that had learned a new trick.

"It speaks," she said. "That's fine. They all speak at first. It stops." She nodded to Cassiday. "Get her down."

Cassiday stepped up onto the platform and put his hand on the first cuff.